In an iTunes Age, the Case for Vinyl

Any music aficionado worth his salt will always claim vinyl as
the best format for music. Records are the Cadillac of musical mediums.
Digital hi-fi snobs exist, but they are few and far between. Those
audiophiles who obsessively fawn over obscure additions to their
stereos - like tube amps, gold cables and wooden knobs—recognize the
flattening of the waveform, the lack of gate-fold art, and other
aesthetic flaws of the digital form.

That might be well and good
for hi-fidelity obsessives, but there's a better reason for the
non-fanatical to return to an antiquated medium like vinyl. Listening
to music on a computer or iPod via headphones has become the ultimate
in anti-social activities. It is the soundtrack for work. With
headphones and mp3s, music becomes a discretely personal affair.
Although a personal attachment to music is a good thing, it eliminates
the social components of music. The shared experience of listening with
others is not unlike thecultural rituals of communal eating.
Music may not have the primal necessity of food, but it is something
people commonly ingest together. To listen alone might be akin to
eating a cheeseburger in a corner: nourishing but isolated.

Before
recording technologies became available, music was a primarily social
affair. Live performance was the only avenue to experience music,
whether it be at the opera, dancehall, or church. Since the inception
of recordings, and then headphones, and then personal listening
devices, that musical experience has become mainly a conduit between
one person and their audio components.

Headphones have been
around for the better part of a century, invented in the
early 1920s by a Utahan named Nathaniel Baldwin who subsequently spent
the money he made from the invention on a dead-end gold mine and a
vacation spot he dubbed "Polygamy Alley". Baldwin's headphones were
clunky, slightly dangerous, and mainly used for radio transmissions. It
wasn't until the 1950s that John Koss invented the stereo headphone
that we know today.

Still, it wasn't until the Sony Walkman,
invented by Akio Morita, came along that headphones became a common
accessory. That combination of portability and independence provided
was a huge success. Parents no longer needed to be annoyed by the music
tastes of their children. Children no longer needed to interact with
their parents. Everybody could be satisfied with their own preferences.
They were the logical accoutrement of the '80s.

Even from its
inception, the Walkman was criticized for its anti-social, atomizing
effects. It was also feared as a harbinger of unfettered capitalism and
ignorance, although many other products could fall under the latter
categories too. A Tokyo professor by the name of Shuhei Hosokawa
countered that the Walkman actually empowered people in urban spaces
who had been alienated from "harmonious contact with nature". Listening
to music this way might create a secret audio theater which could
transform a person's perceived landscape into something they
controlled.

That was the bonus of the Walkman. But Hosokawa
also described the sharing of music from Walkman to Walkman, something
akin to making a mixtape or sending someone a leaked album, as
"incompossible communication which establishes a radically positive
distance", or, in other words, a shallower form of interaction. He
considered that experience as a cheapened form of listening with its
simplicity, immediacy, and low fidelity.

This still holds true
now that iPods and mp3s have made the Walkman obsolete. You can
approximate fidelity far beyond what any reasonable listener would
notice with higher bit-rate files, but it's the 128kbps mp3—that
easily downloadable nexus of decent compression and respectable quality—that is the de facto format. It is certainly possible to connect an
iPod to a single-ended, mono-block, tube amp and play Pink Floyd's Dark
Side of the Moon on repeat, but you still need a computer. Mobile
devices are surrogates of other computers. They don't hold much on
their own. It's a temporary detachment and computers don't make for
simple interfaces.

Producing records of shellac made from the secretions of the female lac
beetle—to the mastering, the lacquering, and the hydraulic pressing—is an intensive and expensive process. Something that can be hard to
justify for its aesthetic properties. This may be why only the truly
obsessive still buy them.

Laser turntables could be a perfect
middle ground. Rather than a regular turntable with a physical stylus
feeling the stubble of minute grooves to determine an audio signal,
laser turntables offer the possibility of pure, concentrated light
skimming the surface to mine even more detail from the delicate
texture. For those who wish to relive and relish the ritual of putting
disk to plate in a social context to listen to music, laser turntables
offer all of the same aesthetic qualities of regular turntables but
without the annoyances of changing tracks.

Few
people can, or would want to, justify purchasing something like a laser
turntable, but it's an interesting possibility. If the complications of
old mediums were eliminated, would people eventually return to social
listening and eliminate Hosokawa's "incompossible communication"
issues? Chances are that the convenience of portable, immediately
accessible music is too hard to give up. But it may not be a foregone conclusion.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones is a Washington, D.C.-based writer whose work has also appeared in the Toronto Star, Morning News, Washington City Paper, and the Awl.